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Statistics Sunday: Some Psychometric Tricks in R

Statistics Sunday: Some Psychometrics Tricks in R It’s been a long time since I’ve posted a Statistics Sunday post! Now that I’m moved out of my apartment and into my house, I have a bit more time on my hands, but work has been quite busy. Today, I’m preparing for 2 upcoming standard-setting studies by drawing a sample of items from 2 of our exams. So I thought I’d share what I’m up to in order to pass on some of these new psychometric tricks I’ve learned to help me with this project.

Because I can’t share data from our item banks, I’ll generate a fake dataset to use in my demonstration. For the exams I’m using for my upcoming standard setting, I want to draw a large sample of items, stratified by both item difficulty (so that I have a range of items across the Rasch difficulties) and item domain (the topic from the exam outline that is assessed by that item). Let’s pretend I have an exam with 3 domains, and a bank of 600 items. I can generate that data like this:

The variable domain is the domain label, and b is the item difficulty. I decided to sort that varible within each dataset so I can easily see that it goes across a range of difficulties, both positive and negative.

Now, let’s say I want to draw 100 items from my item bank, and I want them to be stratified by difficulty and by domain. I’d like my sample to range across the potential item difficulties fairly equally, but I want my sample of items to be weighted by the percentages from the exam outline. That is, let’s say I have an outline that says for each exam: 24% of items should come from domain 1, 48% from domain 2, and 28% from domain 3. So I want to draw 24 from domain1, 48 from domain2, and 28 from domain3. Drawing such a random sample is pretty easy, but I also want to make sure I get items that are very easy, very hard, and all the levels in between.

I’ll be honest: I had trouble figuring out the best way to do this with a continuous variable. Instead, I decided to classify items by quartile, then drew an equal number of items from each quartile.

The code uses the quantile command, which you may remember from my post on quantile regression. The nice thing about using quantiles is that I can define that however I wish. So I didn’t have to divide my items into quartiles (groups of 4); I could have divided them up into more or fewer groups as I saw fit. To aid in drawing samples across domains of varying percentages, I’d probably want to pick a quantile that is a common multiple of the domain percentages. In this case, I purposefully designed the outline so that 4 was a common multiple.

To draw my sample, I’ll use the sampling library (which you’ll want to install with install.packages(“sampling”) if you’ve never done so before), and the strata function.

The resulting data frame has 4 variables – the quartile value (since that was used for stratification), the ID_unit (row number from the original dataset), probability of being selected (in this case equal, since I requested equally-sized strata), and stratum number. So I would want to merge my item difficulties into this dataset, as well as any identifiers I have so that I can pull the correct items. (For the time being, we’ll just pretend row number is the identifier, though this is likely not the case for large item banks.)